Shaun Inman has an interesting blog post proposing CSS parent selectors. Something a lot of people (including me) have been begging for. The proposal on the surface looks good and sound, but when you dig into the comments, apparently it’s a lot more complicated. Take particular note of the responses from Dave Hyatt, he’s the lead developer on Webkit. You find out why it’s not something that will be implemented, and surprisingly (at least to me), how CSS selectors in general can get expensive in terms of performance. Especially for large scale web apps.

I was always with the understanding that CSS selectors were the most optimal route for CSS definitions, since your getting very specific about the element you want to style and not adding a ton of IDs and classes to your HTML. Apparently when it comes to performance the opposite is true. While it seems this performance hit isn’t noticeable on smaller scale sites, it can become a performance bottleneck on larger scale web-apps. The problem is I don’t know what the degree of the performance hit is and how complicated your site needs to be for it to be noticeable. I’m also not clear on if this is a browser specific issue. Browsers that are referenced include Safari and Firefox, but does IE or Opera suffer from this as well?

If this issue gets any more prominence, I’m sure some performance tests strictly dealing with CSS will start to emerge. As of right now, it’s something take note and of and keep on eye on.

Yes we can.

Submitted as my contribution to the Polling Place Photo Project

I’ve started up a tumblelog. It’s called “nothing but flowers”. It’s where I’ll be posting things like links, videos, photos and random thoughts. I’ll probably be posting there frequently. Stop on by.

I’ve defeated Bowser. Now on to 120 stars.

I have to admit this years Macworld keynote was pretty lackluster. There wasn’t that sense of “Apple’s done it again!”. It was more “Oh, that’s nice”. Anyway, here’s may take on what was announced.

Apple TV Take 2
The new Apple TV looks pretty sweet. With the ability to download content directly to it, sync it with my mac and rent feature films this could easily replace countless stacks of DVD’s in my house as well as move out some media equipment. That is if it would work on my TV. I’m not in the High Def age yet so that leaves me out in the cold. But when the time comes to buy that new TV, an Apple TV will also be in the shopping cart. Out of all the announcements Apple made today, I believe this to be the most significant and exciting.

Time Capsule
This is a fabulous idea and I totally want one. But oh wait, I purchased an Airport Extreme that has the ability to hook up and share a USB hard drive. And before Apple released Leopard, the ability to sync time machine with this connected hard drive was a touted feature. Then when Leopard was released to the wild, the feature was dropped. Awesome, 50% of the reason I purchased the Airport Extreme was dropped. Thanks Apple. The optimistic side of me is hoping that a 10.5.2 update will resurrect this feature and that it wasn’t dropped in order to make selling this product more viable.

iPhone & iPod Touch updates
I don’t have either of these so I really don’t have much of an opinion. But I think charging iPod Touch owners $20 for a software update that provides additional apps that already exist on the iPhone while providing a software update that offers significant new features to iPhone users for free isn’t right. And the fact that all new iPod Touch owners get this update for free doubles that. If I was an iPod Touch owner I’d be pretty pissed.

Macbook Air
It’s a gorgeous machine. Beautifully designed and I love the simplicity of it. But it’s not a sub-notebook. It’s a notebook, just a lot thinner with less features. I think having it as thin as it is with the footprint of the 12” Powerbook would have made this a killer product.

10.5.2 Update
It wasn’t announced or released and it’s the only thing I really wanted. There are a slew of stupid annoying bugs in Leopard and I’m praying it will fix most of them. The most significant of which would be fixing iCal.

Jon pimped out our foosball table with floodlights at the Hive for better night time playing. Game On!

Driving Rain from Jim Barraud on Vimeo.

Outside the Media-Hive office window.

I’ve been pretty lax in posts around here lately due to wrapping up end of year projects at work, the holidays, and an end of the year vacation. But now the new year is upon us and it’s time to get the train a movin’ again.

Christmas vacation was a blast for several reasons. The first being it was vacation time for me and family. I pretty much disconnected myself from the outside (internet) world. I got several house projects done that the wife and I have been talking about doing over the past year. And it was pretty much a “Nintendo” christmas since Santa left a Wii for the family under the tree. And the wife and I bestowed the kids each with their own Nintendo DS for Christmas (now Daddy has someone to play with :)

But the biggest surprise for me was the gift from the wife. She blessed me with a new Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Which was a surprise indeed. Apparently it was between that and new sneakers. She choose wisely. The new XTi will serve as the replacement for my current Gen1 Digital Rebel. But it’s also sparking and a renewed interest in sharpening my photography skills. So if I had to make a personal resolution for the new year, that would be it. Sharpening my photography skills. That in addition to the standard resolutions of save money, loose weight, backup my data, etc.

So be prepared for more photographic goodness in the coming year.

HTML formated emails are considered the spawn of the devil by some. And by others it’s considered the next evolutionary step in email. Whichever side you sit on, both agree the HTML formated emails aren’t going anywhere and will only become more popular.

From a developers point of view, creating an HTML formatted email can be about as fun as root canal. Why? Because as opposed to browsers, which there are only 2-3 core browsers (calm down fringe browser people), there are 10-15 core email clients. The level HTML and CSS support varies greater then the level of support the browsers had in the dark days of the browser wars. To encourage browser makers to comply to the basic set of web standards support, the Web Standards Project was created. This was (and still is) a group that lobbied browser makers to support web standards. Proving that it was not only for the benefit for web developer, but also for end users and the browser makers themselves. They have been extremely successful their efforts.

The Email Standards Project aims to do the same for HTML/CSS standards support within email clients. They’ve just launched their official site which contains info on why this matters, what you can do, and a list of popular email clients and their current level of standards support. They’ve even created an Email Standards Acid Test for testing the level of support of each email client.

I encourage anyone who has to create HTML formated emails or anyone who relies on them as promotional tools for their business to visit the Email Standards Project and show your support.

The latest project to launch at the Hive is the online presence for Homedics. Homedics sells as an extensive line of personal health and wellness products. You may have seen some of their commercials on TV lately.

Media-Hive was tasked with the visual design of their new website/eStore and integrating that design into the ATG Commerce OnDemand platform. My comrades at the Hive did an excellent job with both the visual design and the implementation of that design into the platform. I had a minor role in the beginning of the visual design process with presenting one of several design directions. While it wasn’t picked for further refinement, you can view my original design direction below.

The wife and I took one of our regular Bucks County day trips this past holiday weekend and visited the Mercer Museum. Choice quote of the museum visit was “So, this is basically a museum of really old stuff”. To which the wife replied “Yes dear, this is a museum of really old stuff”.

What I meant to say was, “So, this is a museum of pre-industrial tools and artifacts collected by Henry Chapmen Mercer.” Really. It’s what I meant to say.

View the Flickr Set

This weekend I launched my latest freelance project. A website redesign for a local day spa, Simply Skin. The redesign included a complete information architecture and aesthetic makeover.

The goals of the project that were achieved are:

• Improved Information Architecture - The navigation of the new site is simpler then the previous. The top level navigation decreased from 8 items to 6 due to the consolidation of navigation items that were similar in nature. I’ve also employed the use a of “fat bottom” footer that contains useful information, such as spa hours, regardless of where you are on the site.
• More Modern Aesthetics - The aesthetics of the previous site had a predominantly feminine feel using various shades of pinks as the color palette. One of the main aesthetic goals for the new site was to make a more male friendly. This actually tied in with the other main aesthetic goal of the site, to make it more in tune with the recent renovation at the spa. This resulted in eliminating the pink and introducing beach cottage colors that tie into the new feel of the Spa.
• Addition of a Content Management System - It was important for the employees of the spa to have the capability to update the site with new services, prices, and products as the need arose. For this, the site has been built upon the Wordpress content management system. The flexibility of the Wordpress architecture and extendibility of it via the various plugins available made it possible to make every bit of content easily manageable.
• Adding the Simply Skin Product Line for Online Purchase - The previous site offered it’s clients the ability to purchase spa gift cards online. With the redesign, we took that concept a step further by offering Simply Skin’s own line of spa products for purchase online.

My role in the project was that of a one man band. Design, Development, Wordpress Integration, Paypal Integration, Project Management & Photography (for Spa Orientation & Spa Tour).

The site can viewed at http://simplysdayspa.com

I’ve transfered my RSS feeding duties over to FeedBurner for all the cool things that feed burner offers. The old feed will still work fine. But if you’re currently subscribed to the old feed, unsubscribing and subscribing to the new FeedBurner URL would be peachy. Thanks.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/jimbarraud

“Don’t try to be original, just try to be good”

While the upgrade to Leopard has overall been a great thing, as with any OS upgrade, there have been some issues. Many of these I listed in my Leopard Observations post. But the most annoying and persistent has been that of iCal not firing off any reminder alarms. I rely heavily on these to remind me of meetings and conference calls and not having the reminders has been a huge pain in the ass. And I’m not the only one with this issue.

I was hoping that the first Leopard point release 10.5.1 would solve this (and other) issues, but it hasn’t. After a couple of quick tests, alarms still aren’t firing… then rage ensues. After taking a deep breath and doing a little digging into the iCal library support files, I discovered two glimmers of hope. alarmsCache.plist and notifications.plist. These two files are located in the /Library/Application Support/iCal directory. After removing these files and restarting iCal, my reminder alarms have miraculously sprung back to life. Hallelujah! I don’t think these files are anything more that cache and preference files, but you never know. So remove at your own risk.

I post this for anyone else suffering from this bug in hopes that it will save you some sanity.

Update: Nevermind. After fixing this several times, after a few days it just reverts back to not working. If anyone has a definitive fix, please let me know.